Design in Pages, E-mail Design?

Question

I am trying to figure out how to e-mail something I have designed in Pages as an E-mail. In other words I don't want it to be an attachment that someone has to click on I want it to be something that someone views when they open the e-mail. I also want to include images in the design along with hyperlinks that people can click on and it will take them to the website. I tried saving it as an html but that was a mess and it still only attached it, not inserted it into the body of the e-mail. Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Sean

Answer 1

I am trying to figure out how to e-mail something I
have designed in Pages as an E-mail. In other words
I don't want it to be an attachment that someone has
to click on I want it to be something that someone
views when they open the e-mail. I also want to
include images in the design along with hyperlinks
that people can click on and it will take them to the
website. I tried saving it as an html but that was a
mess and it still only attached it, not inserted it
into the body of the e-mail.
Welcome to the Forum Sean.
To do this you will need to send a Pages document in a HTML format. And as Barbara notes, this won't work for every recipient as many tell their email program not to display HTML for security reasons. That is, spammers embed links to uniquely named images on their web page to confirm they have found a real email address. Everyone, even Mac users, should stop images from being displayed in email messages, even if they're happy to receive HTML formatted messages.
Another issue to consider is that Pages doesn't output HTML well. The look of what you design in Pages will not survive the conversion to HTML. It will look quite a bit different and require you to manually edit the HTML to fix it. For this reason, I'd recommend not creating HTML documents in Pages. If you have iLife '06, use iWeb instead. It produces much better HTML documents. There are other products you can use too. like Netscape Composer, Mozilla NVU, HTML text editors like skEdit, Adobe Dreamweaver, etc.
The alternative is just to create a Pages document, convert it to a PDF, and attach it to the email (or provide a link to it on your web site). Then you can guarantee the formatting will be exactly what you want, and will be what they see when they open it. This does require your user to have one of the many free PDF readers installed on their computer (almost all have). It also requires you to be using Mac OS X 10.4.4 or newer so that shadows and links are not destroyed when the Pages document is converted to PDF.
Dale